dyork: Give xrefer a whirl. Used to
use www.m-w.com, but got annoyed when they started changing
their interfaces around. xref is much more than just a
dictionary, though it does that pretty well too.

Went to an engagement party for a friend tonight. Not
entirely sure as to the wisdom of the the whole deal (think
both of them are too young, emotionally), but it's their
lives. Thing is, where we all come from, once the vows are
taken, you can't just walk away if things don't turn out so
well. Forever is a long time when you're not happy.

Haven't done much in the way of coding lately. Life is a
really odd thing. I have a personal theory that the universe
can be described as a fractal, with various places in the
fractal corresponding to specific places and times. Choose a
point and start zooming in. No matter how closely you look,
there's always something more that can be seen by looking
even more closely. Infinite detail in infinite combination.
Huh, that last bit sound suspiciously like some philosophy
espoused by the Vulcans from Star Trek. Time for the padded
cell.

It's all pretty much dead on my end. I think I need to get
out of the house, as I'm finding that I've developed a
tendancy to sleep till noon and still be exhausted by 8PM.
No work yet. I'm thinking about taking some savings and
going to Ireland with my brother (if he can scrounge up the
money). Sceptre Ireland is running some rather interesting
specials for travel through the end of March.

Noticed Alan Cox's comments about the mess that was I2O. I
can truly sympathise. I spent far too much time sludging
through the 400+ sheets of double-sided 8.5"x11" printout
that made up the I2O specification. Fortunately, the company
I worked for decided to ditch I2O (too much hassle, and the
customers started developing nervous twitches when our sales
people said "I2O"). Instead, we rolled our own company-wide
wrapper for storage and network controllers. From the
comments of several former co-workers who had been on the
various I2O committees, I2O started out as something cool
and then got bogged down in the committees. Design by
committee rarely produces anything good, something that is
all too easily forgotten.

dayta:
You're not alone in this complaint. One of my former
co-workers used to whine at me about this every month or so
(I was the defacto "Linux/Free Software/Open Source" person
in the office and was thus considered an appropriate
target). It seems he had had occasion to take a few swipes
at the Linux IPv4 stack and a few bits of network related
userland code while working on his Master's project, and had
a bad experience with the almost complete lack of
documentation and the use of cryptic variable/function names.

Considering that one of the main points of free software is
that it is "open to many eyes," it seems to be a little off
that so many of the prime examples of free software make
little if any effort into making the code more understandable.

I, myself, had more than one occasion to grumble about the
crypticness of the network stack while at my previous job.

Went to day one of two days of an "outplacement services
workshop" paid for by LSI. Not my usual cup of tea, but
necessity makes for strange interests. First day consisted
of talking about how everyone was feeling in regards to
being RIF'd, doing "accomplishments" and strengths
inventories, discussing a systematic method for networking
(of the human to human variety, not computer<->computer) and
some tips on what not to do w/ your resume. Interesting
factoids: only 15% of the workforce gets jobs from
responding to help wanted adds. The rest are found by
talking to a friend of an associate's friend and so on.
According to the fellow running the workshop, those stats
change to 9%/91% for jobs in technical fields. This presents
a difficulty for many in the workshop: either they haven't
been around long enough to build much, if any, of a network
(i.e. me and one of the other guys from my group that got
axed) or they'd been w/ LSI (actually,
NCR->ATT->Symbios->LSI, if you want to follow the trail of
buyouts) for so long that most all of their contacts are
stale. One of the guys was coming up on his 29th year and
another hit 23 years the day he was laid off. Either way, it
means a bit of extra work.

Tomorrow: more resume work.

So, for anyone who knows someone who could use a network
server developer, Perl/CGI/DB person, Linux driver/network
stack munger or just about anything else that involves
C/C++, Perl or Korn work on a Unix/Linux OS, I can be
reached at klevin@eskimo.com. Heck, I've got nothing against
other languages (had briefer flings w/ Common LISP, Java,
and CORBA via C bindings).

chakie I too have a visceral aversion
to the KKK. I believe the issue is that once you start
silencing "extremist" groups, it becomes difficult to stop
and the definition of what is "extremist" keeps geting wider
and wider.

--

I've figured out what the "person" and "proj" tags do here
on advogato, but still not sure on the "wiki" tag, so here's
and experiment, wiki'ized "klevin": klevin.

Hmmm. Amusing, but I'm not sure of the utility. Perhaps
that's because there's no entry for "klevin". I may have to
remedy that.

Not much activity here. Mostly just trying not to stress too
much. The job search is produced sparse results, sent my
resume in on two jobs (one a telecomuting job, the other, a
job located in Seattle). I have comitments through August
that are most easily met here in Wichita, so I'm trying to
find a job that will allow me to telecomute, or, if located
in Wichita, is not a permanent job, as I could not, in good
conscience, accept a "permanent" job when I have every
intention of moving after August. If I can't find either a
temp job in Wichita or a telecomuting job, then I'll have to
move, and Seattle was my intended destination anyways, so . . .

When I can consentrate, I've been looking at the code for
OpenSSH's sftp program. I don't think it will be much work
to extended it, but I'm not too sure of the best method.
Either I take the existing code and meld additional
functionality on, or I use it as a reference, but write my
own client from scratch. The advantage of option one is that
it would be less work (in theory), but it means my code
would be under the BSD license (as I understand these
things). Option two, more work, but I can place the code
under the GPL. I don't have anything against the BSD style
licenses, per se. However, I'm more familiar with the GPL.

Well, the press releases have been out for a while, so I can
say it. Bloody massive layoffs going down today.
Management's got their heads in anatomically impossible
places. They appear to being taking senior developers.
Probably the "higher saleries first" idea. Thing is, once
you factor in benefits, the salary delta isn't that big. A
good friend and one of two people who've worked here that I
consider a mentor just took the long walk to the conference
room. I don't know if I'm going to cry, vomit or both. Only
thing on my playlist today is Bad Religion. A person w/ way
more experience, a wife and kids is getting the axe instead of
me, who's young, single, no kids, and quite frankly doesn't
know squat. Life bloody well sucks.

--

Ok, how about "in addition to" as opposed to "instead of."
And a repeat of the last line above.

Catching up on email and various stuff that I can't do from
home (the fact that LSI uses Cisco's VPN 3000 setup, which
doesn't have a linux client, really puts a crimp in what I
can do over a VPN connection). All sorts of rumors floating
around here at work. Consequently, not much work is getting
done. Lots of hallway conversations, though.

Trying to get a driver source package and a hbaapi library
binary package put together for several "SAN Management"
companies that want to test their apps with our boards under
Linux. Pam says she's going to put out another driver
package tomorrow for her test people, so I'll wait for that
instead of cranking my own out.

Still working from home. At least I can have good coffee w/o
coughing up $3+ for a mocha or latte from the caffe in the
Barnes and Noble near work. The coffee at work, is, well,
bad. The only reason to drink it is if you're in dire need
of caffine.